OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla.—It’s the middle of June, and Shane Battier is still playing NBA basketball.

He is not a playoff neophyte—this is his eighth run—but in his first five postseasons, his team was eliminated in the first round, barely making it into May. His last two times out, his team (Houston in 2008 and Memphis last year) at least reached the second round, but he had never gotten further until he latched on with the Heat as a free agent before this season.

Battier is 33 now, so an intrepid reporter (this one) asked him where he is at this point, physically, compared to most seasons. “Physically, normally, where I would be at this time of year, is on a beach somewhere with a margarita. Is that fair?” Battier said. Zing.

Certainly, the Heat are glad that Battier is still in uniform. He was a key to Miami's Finals-tying Game 2 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder, shooting 5-for-7 from the 3-point line—including one with 5:08 to play in the fourth quarter that miraculously banked in as the 24-second clock was winding down—and scoring 17 points. Battier even made a running floater in the lane, something he has not done in about a decade.

It wasn’t just Game 2, either. Battier has picked a pretty good time to get hot with this 3-point shot. He has made at least one in six straight games, and over that stretch, he is 18-for-32 (56.3 percent) from the arc. Oklahoma City, as teams have done throughout the playoffs, pays so much attention to Heat stars Dwyane Wade and LeBron James that Battier has found himself with wide-open looks. As Thunder guard James Harden said, “You can’t guard everything. Sometimes you have to choose what you want to stop. We didn’t stop him.”

This is what the Heat envisioned when they picked up Battier. His versatility as a defender has been invaluable, but Miami also liked his history as a 3-point shooter, at 38.2 percent for his career. For much of the year, though, that didn’t quite work out the way the Heat had hoped. Battier shot just 33.9 percent from the 3-point line during the regular season, and before he caught fire against the Boston Celtics, he was shooting just 27.7 percent in the postseason.

Coach Erik Spoelstra has consistently said that he is not all that concerned about what Battier does with his shooting, that his ability to lock down defensively is what matters. He did it frequently in these playoffs, guarding the likes of the Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony, the Pacers’ David West and the Celtics’ Paul Pierce along the way. That allows Spoelstra to be a lot more flexible with his rotations and his lineup. When he brought Chris Bosh back into the starting five in Game 2— Bosh had been coming off the bench since returning from an abdominal injury—Spoelstra moved Bosh to center and went with a small lineup in order to keep Battier with the first unit.

“Everybody notices Shane Battier is when the ball is going in,” Spoelstra said. “We notice everything else before that, his versatility. He allows us to play our roster the way we need to, and we weren't necessarily able to do that last year. And so now we're able to play LeBron at several different positions, and same with Dwyane, and he kind of ties that all together. But yes, it's the defensive plays that he makes, it's the leadership, all the details mean everything to him, and that's become contagious to this group.”

Of course, when the shots are going in, it’s all the better.

“That's huge,” Bosh said. “That's one of our strengths. We want to spread the floor out. But if they're coming off of Shane, Shane practices that shot all the time. He's a very good 3-point shooter, he's going to let it go without hesitation. We need him to take those shots. We need him to take them and make them. It really opens it up. It puts pressure on the defense and makes them think about it a little bit more, and eventually we can start attacking, get free throws and layups.”

As for the beach and the margarita, Battier said they’ll still be there in the next week or 10 days, when The Finals wrap up. In the meantime, physically, he is holding up.

“This is my first deep playoff run,” he said. “You don’t think about fatigue. You really don’t. You’re so excited to be here, so juiced. There’s no time to be tired. You don’t have time to think about, ‘Man, I am tired.’"